alembic of your pumping muscle. Inky juice, refined into maiden’s tears, fed the beast on your back. It happened like the last drops of honey from the jar. Within a week the pink stain was a glowing serpent crawling from your ponytail into your waistband. Within a month your skin was a blushing cat’s tongue of petite shark’s teeth. On our anniversary you grew wings; we danced across a cicada shell carpet as their origins played a summer waltz.
[2] Sometime between the exodus of the unicorns and the arrival of the dentist who created the cotton candy machine, the spun confection was known far and wide as fairy floss. Finding authentic fairy floss was an almost impossible task, but it kept you smiling needles and stopped the gouts of black fire that kept ruining the bed and curtains. I scrubbed it into your scales with steel wool sheered from the last steel sheep. I scavenged sticky remnants from my fingers after feeding your ravenous trap of razors. Each morning I traced my body in styptic pencil from the wounds received from loving you.
[3] With every step you scorched the ground I worshipped. So we drew up flight plans with goat’s blood. Plans for a New Zealand holiday. I took an airplane and you took the opportunity to bare your body to the sun. You told me you could carve the clouds like ice-sculptures and the light glistered from your stormy lamina. I met you in the rainforest and we climbed together through slurry up the Fox Glacier. I didn’t feel your hand dissolving in my gloved hand, but by the time we reached the top you were a fine-cut diamond holding a fading flame in your ruby womb. The wind blew. Your skin sang. And you vanished.
[4] The earth can be felt with all five senses, but her arched hyperborean body was no substitute for your phosphorus-scented armor of scalpels. Water pooled beneath me, a testament to your heat. There in the air, in front of my face, hung your beet-stained heart. It was filled with flame riding over an oily sea of
Nolan Liebert | 25